Climate Innovation Junior Consultant, UNICEF Office of Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden, 5 months (50 days)

Consultant Programme & Policy Innovation

Contract

This is a Consultancy contract. More about Consultancy contracts.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child... innovate

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF's Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world's children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

• Connecting youth communities (or more broadly -- anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.
• Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach -- in a traditionally risk averse field -- to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.

• Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

  The Office of Innovation specifically looks to form partnerships around frontier technologies (like drones and UAVs, blockchain, 21st century skills, urban technologies, new banking tools, wearables and sensors, or 3D-Printing) that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion person needs – and to identify how they can grow and scale profitably and inclusively.

Our team

We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions, low- and high-tech, by:

• Looking at the 2–5-year horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies and to see how UNICEF can work with the private sector on doing better business while improving essential services for children.
• Investing in early-stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 02-year future including the Venture Fund that invests in open-source technology solutions from start-ups based in UNICEF’s programme countries.
• Identifying proven solutions that can be implemented at national scale in multiple countries – taking the ideas that help thousands in one country, bringing them to dozens of countries across multiple sectors, and impacting the lives of millions of children.”

About the Climate Change Portfolio

• Children are the least responsible for climate change, yet they will bear the greatest burden of its impact. The worsening effects of climate change mean that children face both the immediate impacts of climate-exacerbated humanitarian emergencies, and the slower-onset impacts such as water scarcity and disease burden. For children who are already disadvantaged, the risks of climate change are even higher: as crises become more common, poorer families will face even greater difficulties recovering from these increasingly frequent shocks.
• The climate crisis is a child rights crisis, and time is running out to make the transformations necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Innovation can and must play a central role in finding solutions to this crisis and accelerating the impact of our work in protecting children from the effects of climate change, placing their needs at the center of environmental strategies, and empowering them as agents of change.
• The UNICEF Climate Innovation portfolio discovers, iterates, validates, and scales digital, social, data and frugal innovations to tackle the most pressing climate challenges facing children and young people. Innovative climate solutions in the portfolio are tackling waste management, air pollution, green upskilling of young people in solar solutions, real time data in climate disaster management. You can read more about UNICEF Innovation Portfolios here: https://www.unicef.org/innovation/innovation-portfolios.

About Innovation30- Young Climate Innovators Shaping the Future Initiative

• Young people are key stakeholders in shaping climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. They bring fresh perspectives, creativity, and innovative ideas to address the climate challenges affecting their communities. In the last decade, there has been a growing global recognition of youth innovators, and a plethora of scalable innovative solutions abound.
• While UNICEF and other UN agencies have already climate programs in place with member states, there remains a disconnect between climate innovations, including youth-led innovations, and government adoption in the trajectory of scale.

The UNICEF Innovation30- Young Climate Innovators Shaping the Future Initiative is developing a pipeline of proven youth-led interventions (developed by youth under 30) with the ambition to scale globally through UNICEF's network of over 190 countries. These solutions are available to the public on the UNICEF website as well as to UNICEF colleagues on INVENT - the UNICEF global marketplace for innovation. This enables UNICEF Country Offices to identify proven climate innovation solutions that respond to their programme needs and priorities. The first global cohort of young, certified climate innovators was showcased at COP28.

How can you make a difference?

• Conduct strategic research on established models of acceleration of climate innovation solutions/initiatives within UNICEF network of COs and partners so to inform the work of the climate innovation portfolio
• Support the Climate Portfolio Manager in providing technical support to UNICEF Country Offices and strategically engaging UNICEF COs and internal stakeholders in initiatives run by the climate portfolio
• Maintain up-to-date records of climate innovation portfolio solutions and Innovation30 solutions; regularly monitor progress of solutions eliciting relevant information from stakeholders.
• Support with the strategic preparation of key events in the climate calendar
• Coordination support for Innovation30 and with refining the Innovation30 and climate portfolio strategic documentation (including but not limited to investment pitches, presentation, database, web articles).

For more details, please see the Terms of Reference here. TOR Climate Junior Consultant.pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• An advanced university degree (master’s or higher) in Environment and Development, Innovation and Entrepreneurship or other relevant fields in Innovation and Climate. *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
• Academic knowledge in the field of environment, sustainability, ecology, climate innovation is required.

Experience

• One year of professional work experience working in the areas of climate change and development is required
• Field-work experience in the area of climate change, environment, sustainability is considered an advantage
• Academic and professional experience with quantitative and qualitative data analysis and research methodology using specialized software (R, SPSS, etc.) is required
• Familiarity with innovation language, including the terminology of frontier technologies (AI, blockchain etc.) is required
• A track record of delivering published analytical written content for external engagement and visibility in sustainability and/or development.
• Experience in organizing high-level events is considered an asset

Skills/ Knowledge

• Strong project coordination skills
• Strong collaboration skills within teams across different locations and with different technical skills
• Full computer literacy in Microsoft Office package (word, excel, power point, notes, teams)
• Data analysis skills using specialized software (R, SPSS, etc.) are considered ad advantage
• Proven capacity to communicate effectively across different mediums
• The candidate must have good interpersonal skills (liaising with people of many different nationalities) and organizations skills
• The candidate must show commitment to the UNICEF core values of care, respect, integrity, trust, accountability, and sustainability. For more information on UNICEF core values, click here.

Travel:

• The consultant is not expected to travel.

Payment details and further considerations

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.

How to apply:

• Interest applicant is required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee. Please see the financial proposal template.
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.  Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.

In case of any questions, contact us at swe-ooi-recruitments@unicef.org

Apply now

Added 1 day ago - Updated 7 hours ago - Source: unicef.org